Becoming Abraham Lincoln: The Coming of Age of Our Greatest President

By Richard Kigel

Becoming Abraham Lincoln: The Coming of Age of Our Greatest President tells the true story of how this great American hero grew up and became a man. The story begins with Lincoln’s cousin describing the murder of Abe’s grandfather in 1782 by the Wabash Indians in the Kentucky wilderness. It ends as Lincoln turns twenty-five, downcast and debt-ridden after the failure of his first business venture, as he earns his first election victory to take his seat in the Illinois State Legislature.

This vivid, authentic account of Abraham Lincoln in his formative years is told by those who were there—his friends and family. Supported by rigorous research, Becoming Abraham Lincoln is an authentic account of Lincoln’s childhood and adolescence in the actual words of those who knew him best. We see Lincoln as he was, according to law partner Billy Herndon, “just as he lived, breathed, ate and laughed in this world.” The historic eyewitness testimony in these pages forms a rich, detailed narrative unmatched in all Lincoln literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Jun 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781510717312

Book preview

Preface

Becoming Abraham Lincoln is biography at its purest. The story of Abraham Lincoln is told by those most qualified to tell it: the men and women who knew Lincoln in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois from the day he was born until he turned twenty-five.

This biography uses only primary source material that historians regard as authentic, observations and statements by individuals who were in a position to tell us what they saw and heard. Here are the actual words of those who grew up with Lincoln—his friends and family. They are the real eyewitnesses to history.

A note about the quotations and sources: most of the statements were collected by William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and friend, in the years following Lincoln’s death. The responses came in original handwritten letters and transcribed interviews. Because of the low literacy levels of many of his subjects, sometimes these statements are difficult to understand. Often they used no punctuation and wrote in fragments of thoughts. Misspellings were common and names and places were often confused. Lincoln was sometimes spelled Linkhorn or Linkern. Lincoln’s grandmother Lucy was sometimes Lucey. Some respondents referred to themselves in the third person. Lincoln himself did in his biographical writings.

In the nineteenth century there were no standards in journalism. It was up to each writer to determine how to present the material. The result can be jarring and inconsistent. Sometimes, Lincoln’s cousin Dennis Hanks sounds like an uneducated country bumpkin and other times like an eloquent diplomat. This is entirely due to differences in literary technique of the writer. Some interviewers who reported on his words prioritized clarity, so they sanitized his language. Other interviewers sought to convey his habitual language patterns and dialect. All of it was perfectly acceptable to nineteenth-century readers.

In spite of all these difficulties, we are able to obtain a vivid, authentic account of Lincoln’s childhood and adolescence in the actual words of those who knew him best. We see Lincoln as he was, according to law partner Billy Herndon, just as he lived, breathed, ate and laughed in this world.

Suppose we could gather all those who knew Lincoln as a child and young man together in one room. We would certainly question them: What was Abraham Lincoln like? What did he say? What did he do? Their observations and statements quoted here would most likely be the words they use when they tell us what they know about Abraham Lincoln.

INTRODUCTION

I saw him this morning about 8:30.

When Walt Whitman went to Washington, DC, in 1862 to find his brother, a Union soldier wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he ended up staying for two years. Visiting battlefield camps and field hospitals, he served as a compassionate nurse, tending to the sick, wounded, and dying, handing out fruit, sweets, and plugs of tobacco to Union and Rebel soldiers and civilians black and white. He talked to them, read to them, and helped them write letters to their loved ones. He stayed with them at night so they would not be alone in their agony.

From the first I kept little notebooks for impromptu jottings in pencil, Whitman wrote.¹ I took notes as I went along, often as I sat talking … writing while the other fellow told his story.²

Whitman wanted America to know the devastating price paid by the American soldier. Future years will never know the seething hell, he wrote.³ I am more than ever convinced that it is important for those of us who were on the scene to put our experiences on record.⁴

Whitman was a newspaperman, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Brooklyn Times. My idea, he said, is a book of the time, worthy of the time.⁵ So he wrote, wrote, wrote,⁶ scribbling in his notebooks, describing sights, sounds, scenes, events, recording his impressions of the moment. You want to catch the first spirit, to tally its birth, he said. By writing at the instant, the very heartbeat of life is caught.⁷

Often while walking near the White House, Whitman would see President Lincoln passing by. A hoosier Michel Angelo, he wrote, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut criss-cross lines and its doughnut complexion.⁸

Whitman described one of these momentary encounters in his notebook. On August 12, 1863, he wrote:

I see the President almost every day as I happen to live where he passes to and from his lodgings out of town. … I saw him this morning about 8:30 coming in to business, riding on Vermont Avenue near L Street. He always has a company of twenty-five or thirty cavalry with sabers drawn and held upright over their shoulders. … Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good sized, easy going gray horse; is dressed in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty; wears a stiff black hat and looks about as ordinary in attire, etc. as the commonest man.⁹

Once, the president noticed the stranger standing alone by the side of the road. For a fleeting moment, their eyes met. The poet’s pen flashed.

They passed me once very close and I saw the President in the face fully as they were moving slowly; and his look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily in my eye. He bowed and smiled … We have got so that we exchange bows and very cordial ones.¹⁰

A poet’s eye runs deep. His vision penetrates the surface of things, touching the essence. Whitman looked upon one of the most familiar faces of all time—it was well known even then—and saw into his soul.

I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep cut lines, the eyes always to me, with a deep latent sadness in the expression. … None of the artists or pictures have caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there.¹¹

Poets see what others miss. In what seems plain and ordinary, they find something exceptional. With their probing scrutiny and mystical insight, they glimpse the future. Whitman knew that one day Americans would celebrate the greatness of this president.

I have fancied, I say, some such venerable relic of this time of ours, preserved to the next or still the next generation of America. I have fancied, on such occasion, the young men gathering around; the awe, the eager questions: What! Have you seen Abraham Lincoln—and heard him speak—and touched his hand? ¹²

Any historical account of Lincoln’s life faces problems with his formative years. Reliable primary source evidence is largely absent. We have few documents that were written at the time. While Lincoln was growing up, nobody around him was scribbling notes and observations as Whitman did. The story of young Lincoln can only be told in anecdotes and reminiscences by those who knew him, collected some forty years later.

Old memories make historians cringe. The very materials we use to forge biography—letters, journals, diaries, interviews, recollections and the like—were all recorded by people who filtered things through their own perceptions and sensibilities, cautions Lincoln biographer Stephen B. Oates.¹³

Building a biography from remembrance has pitfalls. Not only is it often vague and ambiguous, it is notoriously subject to the aberrations of memory, the prejudices of the informant, the selective character of the reporting and the subtle transformations that occur when a story is either resurrected from the depths of the past or recalled repeatedly over time, wrote contemporary historian Douglas L. Wilson.¹⁴

In the field of Lincoln biography, when it comes to his early life, the long memories of old men and women are all we have. The historian must use reminiscence, wrote Lincoln scholar James G. Randall, but he must do so critically.¹⁵

In his own book on young Lincoln, Honor’s Voice (Random House, 1998), historian Wilson lists the criteria for judging whether an informant’s testimony has value:

•   Is it likely that a reported event actually occurred?

•   Is it supported by the weight of the evidence?

•   Does it offer specific details?

•   Does the informant have a reputation for reliability?

•   Does the informant have any prejudices?

•   Was the informant in a position to know what happened?¹⁶

By these standards, Whitman’s scribbled, poetic eyewitness accounts are indeed authentic. But it doesn’t take a poet to give a vivid description that re-creates the life of the moment. Simple unsophisticated men and women can affect us deeply by their richly textured, highly detailed accounts of an event. When they are honest and real, we feel the power in their words.

Words. Lincoln has inspired oceans of them. More words have been written about him, it’s been estimated, than about any other figure in the history of the world with the exception of Jesus, Michiko Kakutani reported in the New York Times.¹⁷

Historians agree that Lincoln himself produced more words than Shakespeare and the Bible combined. Yet he left precious little writing on his childhood and growing up.

I have no confidence in biographies, Lincoln told law partner Billy Herndon in their Springfield office one day. You don’t get a true understanding of the man.¹⁸

I know he thought poorly of the idea of attempting a biographical sketch, said journalist John Scripps, who wrote the candidate’s life story for the 1860 presidential campaign. The chief difficulty I had to encounter, recalled Scripps, was to induce him to communicate the homely facts and incidents of his early life.¹⁹

Why Scripps, Lincoln said, It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life and that’s all you or anyone else can make of it.²⁰

Because he was a candidate for president, Lincoln dashed off some background notes for Scripps.

Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested, wrote Lincoln. There is not much of it, for the reason I suppose, that there is not much of me.²¹

Lincoln wrote two autobiographical accounts totaling less than a dozen pages. It was the only autobiography he left the world.

Since Lincoln never really told his story, his law partner Herndon would. If Mr. Lincoln could speak to me this day, Herndon wrote, he would say ‘Tell the truth. Don’t varnish me.’²²

It became Herndon’s mission.

I think I knew Lincoln well, he said. Thousands of stories about the man I rejected because they were inconsistent with the nature of the man.²³

Wilson reminds us that Herndon has long been in the doghouse of Lincoln scholarship. Among other faults he can be cited for: claiming credit for influencing Lincoln on important issues and for intuitive psychologizing. ²⁴

It was in this process of guessing, of analyzing and inferring from known facts that Herndon went astray, wrote Lincoln scholar Paul Angle.²⁵

Herndon was guilty of myth making. He believed he understood Lincoln and claimed to know the inner workings of his mind. He thought he could fathom the mysteries of the man.

I know Lincoln better than I know myself, he declared.²⁶ My opinions are formed from the evidence before you and in a thousand other things, some of which I heard from Lincoln, others are inferences springing from his acts, from what he said and from what he didn’t say.²⁷

Unfortunately, opinions and inferences based on what someone said and didn’t say are not history. This is speculation and supposition, more fantasy than fact. The great value of Herndon’s portrait of Lincoln becomes clear when he avoids musing and hypothesizing and instead offers what he actually saw and heard for himself. It is then that William Herndon becomes a true biographer.

When Herndon relates a fact as of his own observation, it may generally be accepted without question, Angle wrote.²⁸

In telling the real story of Lincoln, no man gave us a more authentic portrait than Billy Herndon. His extensive collection of letters and interviews provided a live chorus of real voices. These were the people who knew Lincoln. They could tell the Lincoln story as they saw it, heard it, and lived it.

It was Billy Herndon who searched them out, visited their homes, prodded their memories, asked them questions, and preserved their words. It was Herndon and his informants who wrote, wrote, wrote. They may not have caught the first spirit as Whitman did, but their vivid recording of recollected sights, scenes, sounds, events, and impressions of a moment in time sometimes, magically, catches the very heartbeat of life.

In a sense, they are the real Lincoln biographers. It is their history, word for word, as it flowed from their lips and spilled from their pens. If they could come back today, and somehow sit among us and tell us what Lincoln was really like, this may be what they have to say.

Herndon left an extraordinary record of raw, unedited, eyewitness testimony on young Lincoln.

I do not recall another case in history where, immediately after the death of a great personage, the facts of his personal life were collected so carefully, thoroughly and impartially by a lifelong friend and intimate professional associate as the facts about Lincoln were gathered by William H. Herndon, wrote Lincoln biographer Albert Beveridge.²⁹

While Herndon was all too willing to offer opinions, theories, and beliefs about Lincoln, all the evidence shows him to be an honest man. Nowhere in his intimate letters … did Herndon ever suggest the inclusion of a saying or anecdote which he knew to be false, wrote Donald, biographer of both Lincoln and Herndon.³⁰

Herndon was certainly not a liar, said Angle. Surpassing even his devotion to Lincoln was his passion for truth. Never, knowingly, would he distort a fact.³¹

I have gone into his credibility as if I were trying a murder case, said Beveridge.³² In all my investigation, his character shines out clear and stainless. He was almost a fanatic in his devotion to truth. Wherever he states a fact as such, I accept it—unless other indisputable and documentary proof shows that his memory was a little bit defective.³³

Today, Lincoln lives in the words of those who knew him. One thing about the man during his time on earth—he loved to talk. He enjoyed the company of many friends. He loved shooting the breeze. While he was spinning his yarns, joking, discussing, debating, or sharing secrets, someone was listening. Often, that person was Billy Herndon.

Herndon saw more of Lincoln and heard more from Lincoln’s lips than any other human being, excepting Lincoln’s wife, said Beveridge.³⁴

His biography, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, finally appeared in 1889. Weeks before he died, Billy Herndon left his final statement on the extraordinary historical record he gave the world.

I felt it my religious duty to tell all that I knew about Lincoln … I did this to benefit my fellow man … I drew the picture of Mr. Lincoln as I saw him and knew him. I told the naked God’s truth and I’ll stand by it. … Pay or no pay, as to my book, I shall give to the world the facts of Lincoln’s life, truly, faithfully and honestly. The great future can then write its own book.³⁵

Perhaps even Abraham Lincoln would be interested in a biography like this. Like Whitman, he knew the power of words and marveled at their reach, seeing a kind of magic that enables us to exchange thoughts with one another … to converse with the dead, the absent and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.³⁶

History is not history unless it is the truth, said Lincoln.³⁷ For people who like that sort of book, this is the sort of book they would like.³⁸

CHAPTER 1

My good friend is gone.

Good news. It was the message he was waiting for, the report he longed so desperately to hear. After five brutal years of war, unspeakable devastation, and catastrophic numbers of dead, the nation was exhausted and demoralized. At long last, the suffering would soon be over.

President Lincoln received word from his generals that the Union army had marched unopposed into Richmond, Virginia, taking control of the capital of the rebel Confederacy. It was Monday, April 3, 1865.

The next day the president with his young son Tad steamed downriver to Richmond on a US Navy gunship. They passed silent scars of war floating in the water, shattered wagons, smoking hulks of boats, parts of rifles and cannons, and dead horses. When they landed in Richmond, the dockhands immediately recognized the tall gaunt man in the stovepipe hat. The newly freed slaves there knew who he was. One old man threw down his shovel, fell on his knees, and cried, Bless the Lord! There is the great Messiah! Glory Hallelujah!

A jubilant crowd of black men and women surrounded him, calling his name and shouting, Bless the Lord! Father Abraham’s come!

Intoxicated by their first sweet taste of freedom, some tried to kiss the president’s feet.

Don’t kneel to me, Lincoln told them. That is not right. You must kneel to God only and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.¹

A dozen armed sailors walked with the president as the procession made its way through the center of a ravaged, battle-worn city. His bodyguard, William Crook, recalled the scene.

Every window was crowded with heads, he remembered. But it was a silent crowd. There was something oppressive in those thousands of watchers without a sound, either of welcome or hatred.

Crook remembered the president’s appearance at his moment of triumph. I stole a look sideways at Mr. Lincoln. His face … had the calm … of a brave man … ready for whatever may come.²

The president’s party entered a two-story Colonial building with stately pillars in front. It was the Confederate White House.

Lincoln sank wearily into the chair Jefferson Davis used as president of the Confederate States of America. Captain Barnes remembered that the president looked pale and haggard, utterly worn out.

I wonder if I could get a glass of water, Lincoln said.³

Twelve days later, early in the morning of April 15, 1865, as a cold gloomy rain fell in the nation’s capital, Lincoln died after he was shot in the back of his head while at the theater.

My good friend is gone …, Billy Herndon wrote. The news of his going struck me dumb, the deed being so infernally wicked—so monstrous—so huge in consequences that it was too large to enter my brain. … It is … grievously sad to think of one so good, so kind, so loving, so honest, so manly and so great, taken off by the bloody murderous hand of an assassin.⁴

The nation mourned their departed president. Americans from all walks of life came to see the funeral train. The demand for Lincoln stories grew. People needed to hear his reassuring words again, to recall his stories and jokes, to find comfort in his wisdom. Lincoln was gone and America missed him. People were hungry for more Lincoln.

It was Billy Herndon they called on to talk about Lincoln: You knew him, people would say. What was he like? What did he tell you? What was he thinking?

Billy Herndon was the junior partner in the law firm of Lincoln & Herndon from 1844 until the day in 1861 when Lincoln left Springfield, Illinois, for Washington as president-elect. They shared work on court cases and ran political campaigns. Together they managed the birth of the modern Republican Party. They spent long days and evenings debating and analyzing fine points of law, literature, science, philosophy, or any topic that struck their nimble minds.

Herndon, a reader like Lincoln, was always bringing books to the office so they could discuss new ideas. I brought with me additional sermons and lectures by Theodore Parker, he said. One of these was a lecture on ‘The Effect of Slavery on the American People’ delivered in the Music Hall in Boston and which I gave to Lincoln who read and returned it. He liked especially the following expression, which he marked with a pencil … ‘Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.’⁵

Herndon admired Lincoln as a man and loved him as a friend. He was so good and so odd a man, how in the hell could I help study him! he wrote.⁶ Sometimes it appeared to me that Lincoln’s soul was just fresh from the presence of its creator.⁷

Who could possibly know more about Lincoln than Billy Herndon? Who else was with him almost every day? Who could describe him with more authority than Billy Herndon?

When Mr. Lincoln walked he moved cautiously but firmly, his long arms, his hands on them hanging like giant’s hands, swung down by his side. He walked with even tread; his toes, the inner sides of his feet, were parallel if not a little pigeon-toed … In walking, Mr. Lincoln put the whole foot flat down on the ground at once, no landing on the heel. He lifted his foot all at once, not lifting himself from the toes and hence had no spring or snap or get up to his walk.⁸

Was there anyone who looked more studiously at Lincoln’s face? Who else could leave for posterity a detailed portrait of his living features, an accurate description of his color, his expressions, his every wrinkle and furrow?

His forehead was narrow but high. His hair was dark, almost black and lay floating where his fingers put it or the winds left it, piled up and tossed about at random. His cheek bones were high, sharp and prominent. His jaws were long, upcurved and massive, looked solid, heavy and strong. His nose was large, long and blunt, a little awry toward the right eye. … His eyebrows cropped out like a huge jutting rock out of the brow of a hill. His face was long, narrow, sallow and cadaverous, flesh shrunk, shriveled, wrinkled and dry, having on his face a few hairs here and there. … His ears were large and ran out nearly at right angles from the sides of his head, caused by heavy hats. … There was the lone mole on his right cheek just a little above the right corner of his mouth.⁹

Herndon knew that providence blessed him with a unique vantage point on Lincoln’s life. If the nation needed the Lincoln story, he was the man to tell it. Would to God the world knew what I do, he wrote.¹⁰

Seeing Lincoln as I see him, he is a grand character. I see him in my mind from his cradle to his grave and I say Lincoln’s life seems a grand march over the forces and resistances of nature and man. …¹¹

Many of our great men and

Reviews for Becoming Abraham Lincoln

[davidwineberg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Most of the Lincoln shelf – or rather library – focuses on his politics and the Civil War. Richard Kigel’s book is entirely pre-politics – it ends at age 25 when Lincoln is elected to the Illinois legislature (on his second try). The story to that point is warm enough to reinforce Lincoln not only as the greatest president, as we know from all the other works, but as a remarkable human being, from this one.Becoming Abraham Lincoln follows his forebears to the point of his birth, and then Lincoln and his extended family from Kentucky to Indiana and Illinois. His many relatives, friends, neighbors and acquaintances provide multiple verifications for the many wonderful stories, remarkably few of which have become legendary. Kigel addresses this strange gap directly and thoughtfully. They are stories worth knowing.What is striking is how much everyone loved him and made him the center of attention, right from childhood. At age seven he was transcribing letters for adults. He loved to tell stories, both true and tall tales, and there was a sparkle in his eyes as he entertained. He formally gathered other children around and conducted lectures, which they loved. He had a need to laugh and making others laugh gave him satisfaction. He was a practical jokester, and a hard, conscientious worker. He delivered a boat he built to New Orleans, and walked home to Illinois. And it must be remembered that he was not a pretty picture. At six-four and just 160 pounds, he stuck out. His pants never came within five inches of his shoes, when he had any. He had a single suspender to keep them up. His face was described as having been chopped out with an axe, and in need of planing. But he was exceptionally strong, able to press a thousand pounds, several witnesses said, to handle an axe like no one before or since, and a wrestler to reckon with.I can’t even imagine what Lincoln might have been with a real education. His one year of schooling was preceded and supplemented by an intense love of words and books. He read voraciously, studied everything hard, and everything he came upon was a wonder to him. The knowledge he built up blew people away. It was an age when the richest man in town was said to own 30 books. All the children sat in the same classroom and were taught by someone with no formal education. Few became literate beyond signing their own names. Abe Lincoln read science and law and poetry for (obsessive) pleasure. With what little education he had plus his drive to learn, he became one of the wisest men of the age.His life was miserable poverty until his mid-twenties. Between that and the constant presence of death in his life, it’s a wonder he could be the upbeat, positive center of the community, but he was. It wasn’t until later that depression took control, instantly, for long bleak periods. Through it all he was exceptionally honest, exceptionally sincere, and a worthy preview of the great man we rightly revere.David Wineberg